Your in a hurry. All you need is a couple of your favorite items quickly washed and dried. You head over to the laundry machine, throw in your stuff and select “quick wash”. But quick is the farthest thing from the truth. Instead, the machine locks the door, throws around your stuff for 20 minutes, and then begins to add some water. After an hour clothes are released for you to send to the dryer or they enter 20 minute tumble hell again before switching to dry. Even the most conservative settings show up as almost two hours on the clock. Forget taking it out early as the lock won’t release until its “safe” for you to open the door. All you can do is hope it releases your stuff in time to make the engagement.
How did a quick wash and dry suddenly become 2 hours? Did large families really spend their lives washing clothes? Not unless you go back to the days of washboards will you find times like 2 hours for a bit of laundry. I’m sure scrubbing didn’t take an hour either but drying would have been at the mercy of nature, until the industrial revolution anyway. The wringer washer must have seemed magical when it first came on the scene. Maybe it was a bit dangerous with the risk one’s hand could end up in the wringer, but that was quickly remedied with a snap open feature. With a dryer, it sure improved the time and effort it took to do laundry. Soon washers had spinners instead of wringers. Safer and much less retained water. Eventually spin was included with the wash as one unit saving the transfer from one to the other.
Strangely, it only took about 15 minutes to wash, 5 to rinse and spin, and an hour to dry. Adding clothes at any point was a snap too – open the door and thow ‘em in. It was even a form of entertainment for the kids as they could leave to door open and watch the machine work its magic. Despite the “lack of safety” there were no injuries even with kids putting their siblings in the dryer for fun. How did we get from there to over 4 hours a load? This is progress? What went wrong?
Kids were having too much fun, so safety police said doors had to be locked at all times. Environmentalist said water was being wasted, so agitation was replaced with rolling damp clothes in a drum. But since little water was used it didn’t clean well. Solution? Roll them around longer. This created a lump of clothes on one side of the drum so it couldn’t spin properly which was overcome with a complex process of partial spin and drop in an attempt to even the load which didn’t always work so the process would repeat to ready for the spin. Suddenly, the cycle had increased tremendously while access was restricted. The do-gooders were not content to leave the dryer untouched and so it too became laundry jail where clothes would tumble around slowly to “balance” the load before applying heat.
There it is – back to long laundry times. Laundry from hell where things are held captive and are never fully clean because virtually no water is used. But the safely police are happy your kids are safe and environmentalists praise the energy savings although in the end the only thing saved the water that needed to ensure things were clean.